Archives: Movie Reviews

Julia Stiles and husband move to South America and encounter some sort of ancient supernatural tradition claptrap surrounding their young daughter. Paced like a political thriller. Political thrillers aren't scary.

Lauren Cohan stars as a gorgeous nanny hired by an elderly english couple in a remote mansion to care for what she thinks is their son but turns out to be a life-sized doll... until things begin to move around the house. Plenty of fridge logic abounds but I didn't notice it until the a few minutes after the credits rolled and Lauren Cohan had left the screen. She is, I should add, a pretty good actress, as these things go... actually, better than this material. But I would probably enjoy a movie of Lauren Cohan just walking around an empty room for 90 minutes. And this was actually even more than that.

Strange, zero-budget gore film with all the gore edited out. A gorgeous woman threatens to blackmail three gorgeous former friends who had her committed, they accidentally push her down a flight of stairs during the ensuing fight, then cut up the body with all the actual cutting offscreen, and distribute the pieces in remote parks and off cliffs, tidily in black plastic bags so you can't see them. And that's pretty much it, that's the whole movie.

Odd sort of, I dunno, drama? Two women at the opposite ends of motherhood deal with life after an astronomical event over Troy, NY. Low-key enough to be unpretentious in a way that arty films like this usually aren't, which makes it watchable, as do the likeable cast and performances. But don't come looking for sense, story, or resolution, there isn't any of any of those. I kind of enjoyed it because of how low-key it was and because it was set in Troy, near old stomping grounds of mine, but the lack of sense ultimately bothered me.

decent indie werewolf flick. Southern boys at a farmhouse, yet somehow also, gangstas there.

A promising tagline: "female intruder accidentally dies in an introvert's house, so he keeps the body around as a friend. Then she starts to decay..." Starts off ok but ends pretty boring, just not much "there" there. However, has that nebbishy little lady from "A Dirty Shame", who I always like.

"Jurassic Park", except with zombies instead of dinosaurs, as things go wrong for a group of gorgeous tourists at a resort where you can go on safari to kill the sole remaining zombies after humanity recovers from an undead pandemic. Likable final girl and decent cinematography and action sequences make it marginally watchable, but still kind of a proof of the rule that the more guns a "horror" movie has the less worth watching it is. By the time there's explosions, you're already well expecting that at some point there are going to be explosions. And, ok, the very ending is good. I'll give them that.

Somewhere in the same fictional Los Angeles as "Psych" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" (and across a fictional continent from the fictional New York of "Ugly Betty") is "Drop Dead Diva" , perhaps the perfect stupid TV program. A gorgeous model dies but refuses to go to heaven and wakes up in the body of an obese lawyer. Every episode features courtroom drama in which gorgeous legal clients pursue only-on-tv type

The Blair Witch Project with UFOs. Painful.

Ok thriller, looks like a horror movie but no monsters or supernatural. Three people go cave diving, mild jealousy and murder ensue. I think it's Danish or something, the audio sounds like overdubs.

Abducted child torture porn. Two girls are girls, then they are abducted, tortured, killed. The end. Notable for 3 scarily realistic, intense, gory shots of first girl (2 alive, one dead), and what must be a laborious 10 minute scene of nothing but watching a shovel dig a shallow grave while a girl pleads offscreen. Does someone actually consider this entertainment?

Picture this: Cloverfield, except, half a world away, Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis are in a romantic comedy, and it turns out that the giant monster is just duplicating their movements. For real. Ok, I give them some credit for the sheet audacity of trying to make romcom monster movie, but not much more than that.

Self-consciously bizarre, surreal, Gilliam-esque bit of fluff about a guy who builds a labyrinth our of a refrigerator box in his living room which is larger on the inside than the outside, takes on a life of its own and is full of peril and monsters. Seems like it is supposed to be a kids movie, but, has cursing and a vagina. Entertaining for what it is, though. (EDIT: Ah! Written and directed by Calvin and Hobbes's creator Bill Watterson. That makes perfect sense.)(EDIT 2: No. It's a different guy named Bill Watterson. Still, would have made perfect sense.)

(TV show) On the one hand, pretty realistic depiction of high school kids... every one of them is detestable. But, why didn't she just leave a note?

Ok, now we're talking. There's something distinctly Kubrickian about this quiet, low-budget indie flick about three people who sneak into a penthouse apartment only to become trapped over the winter and descend into a grisly struggle to survive. Supernatural forces may or may not be at work. I liked this one pretty well, in a quiet, low-budget indie flick kind of way. The incredible, apparently universal hatred for this film is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I was born on the wrong planet.

Dark Side Of The Moon: All-too-obviously-shot-on-DV B-grade sci/fi horror with too many guns that never lives up to its ultra-groovy space-rock sound track. Pointless nonsense about a gorgeous secret agent investigating a fallen satellite and a portal between a farm in serbia and the moon. I don't know who did that soundtrack, but I bet they're the most popular band in the province. Recurrent cross imagery that I guess is supposed to mean something. I hear Eastern Europeans really like the song "The Final Countdown", too.

Supernatural thriller crossed with hardbitten detective tale. Thre's some gobbledygook about a cursed book. Matt Frewer, which generally tells you about what to expect. Ok, I guess, it was kind of amusing.

Like a caricature of a "Best Picture Oscar Winner"... all the signifiers are here. A complete, pristinely-polished exercise in navel contemplation. Every performance screams, "ACTING!", every soliloquy screams "DRAMATIC WRITING!", the cinematography screams, "CINEMATOGRAPHY!" Despite some good feints in which it appears to be about to descend into complete cliche and then doesn't, nonetheless it's as pretentious as they come, wearing it's "great movie" aspirations on its sleeves, without ever actually saying anything that I could relate to or care about... as perhaps best exemplified by totally unnecessary "look what I can do!" technical exercise of making most of the movie look like one long continuous shot, as if "gee whiz" factor is a substitute for entertainment. All the pretense even renders the extremely cool solo-drumming-only soundtrack into complete contrived artifice, in this context. Granted, complete contrived artifice /can/ work, but it still has to say something. Here, it doesn't.…

teen scream ghost story. Misunderstood orphan girl goes to live with aunt and uncle, finds dead girl's ring in the woods. You know the drill. Erick Avari.

okay Aussie haunted house tale. Three researchers in an empty house tape recording things that go bump in the night. Pretty slow to get where it's going, doesn't aim high, but ultimately it's alright.

"Saw", but with over-the-top Hollywood excess rather than the British restraint that made it good. Very stylish, I'll give it that, like a music video.

Self-consciously quirky black-and-white "Indie" film starring huge megastars. Martin Starr actually acts in this. This guy keeps dumping women after 3 months by paying a friend of his to pretend to be his mother and not get along with them, and there's some sort of thing about babies who don't grow up, which must be a metaphor. It was vaguely ok, I guess, at least not cringeworthy like these things usually totally are.

Charming, amusing northern Irish neo-noir comedy about two laddish 15 year old bike thieves chasing after a rumored lost bale of cocaine and the odd cops, robbers, and local characters they're surrounded by. Quirky and fun... Trainspotting-type humor with much less degeneracy.

Another waste of what I'm assuming is an old Stephen King short story with some ideas that seem like they might have worked in writing, and could have worked with a movie production team that actually wanted them to. In this case, a couple driving through the heartland is lured into a field of tall grass by a crying child, and discovers they can't find their way back to the road. Also includes some time-looping paradox stuff that was really cool the first 5 or 10 times I saw movies use it, although in this case, with zero reason given for why people are moving through time at all, which I guess is kind of a first.

Intolerable YouTube star goes to participate in an Escape Room in Russia. I enjoyed this movie way more than I had any reason to. It had so many of the hallmarks of a terrible movie: overgorgeous cast of hipsters, obsession with social media including perspective of livestream with chat comments and "likes" scrolling by, entirely predictable "twists and turns" obvious derivatives of past movies ("The Game" and pick-your-Eli-Roth-movie.) And yet, it was a way more enjoyable view than it had any right to be. I dunno, the director just knows how to build suspense or something. I actually found it entertaining despite all those flaws.